Case Study: Xbox achieves faster feature delivery and scalable, uninterrupted gaming and music services with Microsoft Azure

Xbox Improves Services and Delivery Speed by Playing Games and Music in the Cloud

Xbox, Microsoft’s gaming and entertainment division, grew from a console business into a global platform for multiplayer gaming, video and music streaming. As services expanded, Xbox faced rapidly rising storage and compute needs, tightly coupled data layers that slowed feature development, and the operational burden of encoding and storing millions of media files across traditional datacenters.

Xbox moved development and data into Microsoft Azure, re‑architecting services to use Azure Blob and Table storage, Virtual Machines, and Media Services for large‑scale encoding and delivery. The cloud migration gave Xbox on‑demand scale and global resilience (supporting a ~40 million‑track catalog and peak encoding capacity of up to 2 million tracks/day with more than 2 PB of storage), reduced downtime risk, and accelerated feature delivery—teams went from monthly releases to some rolling out updates daily—enabling faster, more competitive gaming and media experiences.

Xbox

Michael Alyn Miller

Principal Software Architect